On Auxiliary Cruisers and Such…

December 20, 2009

I’ll be offline most all day. Meanwhile, please check out an excellent post at the Dignified Rant titled “Forward … to a Thousand-Ship American Navy“, by Brian J Dunn. I promise we will discuss this further next week, with a little twist on the idea of “warships off the shelf”.

Brian-I saw no place for comments at the site. Just wanted to say well done for a timely and informative article. Proceedings’ loss is the naval blogosphere’s gain!

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This is an EXCELLENT idea. The UKs Q-ships were not terribly effective in WWI & their auxilliary cruisers, by & large, were not so effective in WWII. Germany, however, deployed offensive auxilliary cruisers in both world wars–WWII in particular. And I think the technology exists now to equip, ah, “A-Team Cruisers” with fairly little effort.

With sufficient encrypted communication capacity, these auxilliary cruisers could deliberately position themselves in harm’s way…and make life very hard (and short) for the pirates that attempt to take them.

It’s simple economics. You don’t eliminate supply. You make the demand curve way too costly to make the endeavor worthwhile.

Red Team Thoughts: Let’s say a second or third-tier power with SSKs makes a deal with a particularly desperate African nation or a power faction in said nation (*cough*Somalia.) The 2nd/3rd tier country makes a deal with the faction to make pirate love to every merchant ship passing through the African country’s waters. This draws in the Type 23s & Burkes & so forth. Close enough to shore. One day a Type 23 or DDG-51 is blown to pieces by a salvo of torpedos from a skulking SSK while conducting anti-piracy operations. Risky move? Yes. But I can think of ways to make it plausibly deniable. In the interim, the US or UK freaks out in a post 9/11 fervor (more likely in the US, the Brits are a little more stoic about these things). All hell breaks loose in Washington & we start some more wars we can’t finish & drop our own economy to 4th world status in the process. Risky, like I said, but viable.

What he leaves out is details about construction standards. Many folks do not realize that ABS and DNV and others have rules for construction of naval auxiliaries aka warships not build to NVR or similar military standards. There are cost savings and some more risk in the approach.

I can see more armed naval auxiliaries but warships in “civilian” hulls is little simplistic.

While Araphao was the birth of modularized aircraft transports, it was not the first T-AKV. Maerask has been marketing an AFSB which I would clasify as T-AKV, but it has many more capabilities and a higher price tag hindering its adoption. NAVAIR is always the stumbling block when it comes to aviation facilities on ANY ship flying aircraft. Maybe we’ll get some relief for UAV pads?

Reminds me of the proposed Shipborne Containerised Air Defence System (SCADS) ship concept developed by British Aerospace for the RN. This arose from the experiences gained with merchant container ships converted into aircraft ferries and improvised aircraft carriers during the Falkland’s war of 1982.

Pre-packaged decking and ski-jump could be used to convert a standard container ship into an auxiliary warship capable of supporting six Sea Harriers and two helos. Standard-sized containers would provide required support equipment and personnel spaces. Sea Wolf SAMs and decoy launchers would have been provided on standard-sized container base units.

I would imagine that a RAM launcher could be fitted to a container base along with the proposed 57 mm gun. If a double height / depth container were used then might not a VLS system for ESSM be possible. I’m thinking of Mk 48 and Mk 56 VLS systems rather than the larger Mk 41 system.

He should submit it to the USNI blog. They seem a bit more open to such ideas and could properly present it to a larger audience.

I have to say that I’m not entirely convinced about the capability of such a ship for forward presence or deterrence, but they’d definitely make great ships for convoy duties, maritime security (anti-piracy), and disaster response.

I especially like the point (which Mr. Dunn does not dwell upon) that these could be configured to support F-35s, V-22s (and UCAVs), just like the WWII converted merchantment. The ability to deploy STO(V)L aircraft from one of these could offer the Gator navy a way of augmenting air power without sacrificing the core amphibious capacity (as with LHA-6). It could also allow the USN to be a bit more comfortable with a smaller CVN fleet as these ships would be available for minor strike and patrol duties.

One mission Mr. Dunn omitted is quite possibly the best one for a low-manning, large-capacity vessel: BMD. A powerful radar system and enough large VLS cells to accomodate current BMD means the Burkes can respond to forward threats while these vessels take over the defense against the long-ranged threat.

I’m sure NASSCO would love to get a crack at such a vessel…they could even use the T-AKE hull (so we could have T-AKE, T-AOE(X), Auxiliary Cruisers, and whatever replaces T-OE all on a common/similar hull).

Having read this I believed it was really informative. I appreciate you spending some time and effort to put this short article together. I once again find myself spending a significant amount of time both reading and leaving comments. But so what, it was still worthwhile!